Many industries are faced with the problem of assembling diverse components into final products which generally are different for each customer or application. For example, in the office furniture business, several manufacturers, including Herman Miller, Steelcase and Westinghouse, offer lines of components which can be interconnected to assemble modules with partitions, writing surfaces, storage, lights, etc., in a nearly infinite variety of different configurations. In some office environments, different modules are assembled to provide work rooms, secretarial stations and offices for all levels of employees.
Another industry facing similar problems is the manufacture of perfusion kits. A perfusion kit is used by doctors during surgery to handle blood outside of the patient's body. A perfusion kit may include an assembly of any of a number of tubes, branch points, valves, needles, injection ports and monitoring options.
A persistent problem in designing and assembling collections of diverse components is the need to keep track of a large number of small components. For example, a typical modular secretarial station might consist of several wall units, multiple filing units, a typewriter surface, a desk, power inputs, lighting, plus numerous fasteners and plates which vary depending whether the module is free standing, adjacent to another module, or between two or more other modules. If a facility has 25 secretarial stations which are essentially identical but have some variations, the number of individual components can be very large. In order to keep track of all of these parts, the industry has developed specifiers or computer programs that facilitate counting how many of each type of component are needed. Some manufacturers distribute current pricing and other information periodically in a computer readable format, which can be read into a specifier to generate a purchase order.
The designer must order enough parts to assemble the modules, the manufacturer or distributor must ship enough parts and the assembly crew must be able to locate the parts to assemble each module. In practice, even with the assistance of a specifier it is difficult to keep track of the large number of discrete parts and industry practice is to order excess basic components, such as fasteners, to be sure enough are on hand to do the final assembly. This is wasteful of resources and adds to the cost of each assembly.
Others have used expert systems for layout and design (see Watanabe et al., U.S. Pat. Nos. 4,651,284 and 4,700,317; Hartsog, U.S. Pat. No. 4,964,060) or have sought to develop improved modelling or space planning methods (see Thomson, U.S. Pat. No. 4,642,780; Aish, U.S. Pat. No. 4,275,449). None of these references teach the present device or method or have been able to produce or manipulate the sophisticated and easily editable assemblies of the present device and method.